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President Joe Biden has already secured a powerful deliverable from his Europe trip – one that will weaken Russia’s strategic position in another detrimental consequence of its invasion of Ukraine.
Turkey’s lifting of its blockade on Sweden’s entry into NATO was a significant and stunning move on the eve of the NATO summit in Lithuania. The reversal by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came hours after he warned Sweden would be out in the cold until Turkey got its long-delayed membership in the European Union.
Once Sweden finally joins NATO, it will bolster Biden’s reputation as a US leader who reinvigorated and expanded the bloc. Finland – which decided to sign up, like Sweden, after the invasion of Ukraine – has already added hundreds of miles of NATO territory on Russia’s border. Biden’s lifeline of arms and ammunition for Ukraine and leadership of the alliance has made him the most significant president in transatlantic affairs at least since George H.W. Bush, who presided over the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany. His legacy will ultimately depend, however, on the outcome of the war in Ukraine and his capacity to avoid a direct clash with Russia.
Turkey’s about-face will also lighten the mood at the NATO summit, where the alliance’s most unified moment in years had been in danger of being somewhat tarnished by divides over Ukraine’s pleas to get a timetable for membership. Biden had said before leaving the US that Ukraine was not ready to join. New member states need unanimous approval of all NATO’s members before they can join the club and benefit from its collective security guarantee.
Erdogan’s move was also a severe blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin. First, it will result in the expansion of NATO territory and strengthen the alliance after an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine that Putin had argued was partly intended to weaken the West and to counter what he claims is its effort to neuter Russia’s power in its own backyard. Secondly, the decision by Erdogan – an increasingly autocratic leader who has enjoyed largely cordial ties with the Kremlin strongman – will frustrate Russia’s attempts to sow divides between NATO members in order to weaken the alliance.
Monday’s events were another intriguing twist for a mercurial leader who has leveraged Turkey’s strategic position where the West meets the East to try to rebuild his country as a major regional power. While it is so far unclear whether Erdogan secured anything more than cosmetic concessions from Sweden, NATO’s European powers and the United States, his sudden change of mind raises the question of whether he had negotiated himself into a corner. He had already dropped objections to Finland joining the alliance.
